CELEBRATING FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
June 4, 2013
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. You just heard a recording of Federico
García Lorca accompanying La Argentinita on the piano. Theirs was a tremendously
fruitful collaboration born out of a time spent together in 1930 toward the end of Lorca’s
yearlong stay in New York, which Lorca would remember, as Christopher Maurer
indicates, as one of the most useful experiences of his life. A year spent in New York,
Vermont, and Havana, which would change his vision of himself and his art.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
1
It’s a great pleasure to welcome you tonight. My name is Paul Holdengräber, and I’m the
Director of Public Programs (applause) here at the New York Public Library, known as
LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here at the library
is simply to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when I’m
successful to make it levitate. I encourage you all to come next week for our closing
night, which will be with the great dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, I recommend that
you come and welcome the end of the season and the beginning of the summer on June
13th.
The trip I mentioned was the first trip the Andalusian poet made to another country. His
significant exposure to urban life, to poverty, social inequality, racial and religious
diversity, and the urban multitude. The sights and sounds of this city, its music and its
people left, as noted, a profound impact on Lorca’s work. Poet in New York was Lorca’s
first book inspired by the city and with it he entered into a lyrical conversation with other
chroniclers of modern urban life such as Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and later Allen
Ginsberg. The recent return of the original manuscript of Poet in New York to its place of
its creative inception has prompted an exhibition curated by Christopher Maurer and
Andrés Soria Olmedo on view now through July 20th here at the New York Public
Library, in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim Gallery entitled Back Tomorrow. The title is
taken from a handwritten note by Lorca to his publisher and friend José Bergamin as he
left the unfinished manuscript of Poet in New York on his desk. “Dear Pepe, I was here to
see you and I believe I will be back tomorrow.” Before he could return he was murdered
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
2
in Granada. Bergamin took the manuscript with him into exile and published it in
Mexico.
We are fortunate to have these poems published now in a new bilingual edition translated
by Greg Simon and Steven White, lovingly compiled and edited and introduced by
Christopher Maurer, with added letters and the lecture “A Poet in New York,” as well as
photographs and notes. We are fortunate, for, as Maurer notes, Lorca’s reluctance to have
his work in print was legendary. “Plays,” he wrote, “Are meant to be heard in a theater.
They ought to last as long as a performance lasts.” Lorca had no wish to see his poems
dead on the page. Even large public readings threatened them, making the poems, he
wrote, “stiffen and tremble like the dirty cats which children stone to death on the
outskirts of villages.”
Not taking heed from Lorca’s warning tonight, we celebrate A Poet in New York with just
such a large reading and performance, though not much talk. As is often the case LIVE
from the New York Public Library you won’t see me anymore, but rather, thankfully, the
poet in his own words, that is, through some of those who admire and at times admonish
him today. Tonight we offer you what Lorca called “bitter, living poetry,” a poetry that
takes on a new life each time it is read aloud.
I encourage you also to pick up a copy of Poet in New York, given new life in the elegant
and intelligent edition FSG has just published on this occasion. Here it is, and 192 Books
has it there, readily available. As W. S. Merwin states, this translation does what one
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
3
wants a translation to do, to make the original really come alive in a second language.
The edition is carefully introduced and edited as I said by Christopher Maurer and
establishes once again Poet in New York to be as Edward Hirsch compellingly writes, “a
wildly imaginative and joyously alienated declaration of residence.”
We pay tribute to the poet through reinterpretation. We will begin tonight with readings
by poets whose own work has been shaped by Lorca’s enduring legacy. First Philip
Levine, followed by Tracy K. Smith, then Paul Muldoon. You will then hear a dramatic
rendition of a lecture Lorca write and delivered before Poet in New York was published.
This dramatic reading will be interspersed with the work of the performance artist and
poet John Giorno. Before our grand finale, delivered by Patti Smith, who I’m so happy to
welcome back to the New York Public Library, (applause) the Lorca scholar Christopher
Maurer will say a few words about Lorca’s most useful year spent in New York City.
A quick word of gratitude: we would like to thank first and foremost our trustee Mahnaz
Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos for making the exhibition and this evening possible.
(applause) As well as Laura García Lorca, president of the Fundación Federico García
Lorca. Thank you, Laura. (applause) Also our thanks to Acción Cultural Española, with
the support of “la Caixa” Foundation. I would also like to thank Elianna Kan, who once
this most extraordinary talent was selected helped orchestrate and give shape to this
evening. Thanks to all and everyone.
(applause)
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
4
And to conclude this very long introduction, something quite brief. Over the last seven
years or so I’ve asked the talent invited here to provide me with a biography in seven
words, a haiku of sorts, or if you’re extremely modern, a tweet. Paul Muldoon was
incapable of giving us seven words. He gave us nine words. “Paul Muldoon published his
first poetry collection in 1973.” Tracy K. Smith: “Current work in progress: twins in
utero.” The lecture of Poet in New York is best represented in the following way: “Man
is not the most important thing.” Or “A wounded pulse sounding the things beyond.” Or
“Sand crocodile and fear over New York.” John Giorno. “John Giorno is a poet from
New York.” Christopher Maurer, “Find the music in lives, loves, texts.” To end our
evening, Patti Smith’s seven words. Patti Smith: “The next artist will be Patti Smith.”
(laughter) And to open our evening tonight, Philip Levine. His seven words: “One. Two.
Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.” Ladies and gentlemen, back tomorrow, please warmly
welcome tonight the 2011–2012 United States Poet Laureate, Philip Levine.
(applause)
PHILIP LEVINE: The light is dazzling, dazzling light. That was quick. Oh, it’s terrible
light to read by. Terrible, complaining already. The woman who got me into this reading,
Elianna Kan, I asked her before the evening. Oh, first, I should thank everybody. Thank
you for inviting me. Thank you for coming to hear about what we folks have to say about
a great poet and I hope we perform well. I asked this woman, Elianna, should I be a little
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
5
comic or should I be, you know, a little heavy? And she said, “Be grim.” (laughter)
Okay, I’m going to do my best to be grim.
I’m going to read three poems. I always give the number so that when I finish the first
you know that you’re a third of the way through, (laughter) and you can hold on. This is
a poem that Rafael Alberti, his friend, his fellow Andalucian poet, and in a way his rival
at times, for me the most gifted along with García Lorca of the Generation of ’27. Poem
he wrote, called “The Coming Back of an Assassinated Poet,” wonderfully translated by
the way by Mark Strand.
The Coming Back of an Assassinated Poet
You have come back to me older and sadder in the drowsy
light of a quiet dream in March your dusty temples
disarmingly gray, and that olive
bronze you had in your magical youth,
furrowed by the passing of years, just as if
you lived out slowly in death
the life you never had while you were alive.
I do not know what you wanted to tell me tonight
with your unexpected visit, the fine alpaca
suit, looking like new, the yellow tie,
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
6
and your carefully combed hair suffering the wind, the same as when
you walked through those gardens of poplars
and hot oleanders of our school days.
Maybe you thought – I want to explain myself
now that I stand outside the dream – that you
had come first to me from those buried
roots or hidden springs where
your bones despair.
Tell me,
tell me,
if in the mute embrace you have given me,
in the tender gesture of offering me a chair, in the simple
manner of sitting near me, of looking at me,
smiling and in silence, without a single word,
tell me if you did not mean
that in spite of our minor disagreements,
you remain joined to me more than ever in death
for the times perhaps
we were not – forgive me! – in life.
If this is not true come back again in a dream
some other night to tell me so.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
7
And now a poem by the master, García Lorca. I have an essay, actually it was a talk I
wrote for Christopher Maurer years ago about finding in García Lorca the inspiration to
write my own poetry, and it’s in a book that I’m sure several of you, three or four have
read, called The Bread of Time, it’s called “The Poet in New York in Detroit” and this
was the poem that sponsored my own poetry and continues to sponsor it. It’s called “New
York (Office and Denunciation).” To Fernando Vela.
Under the multiplications,
a drop of duck’s blood;
under the divisions,
a drop of sailor’s blood;
under the additions, a river of tender blood.
A river that sings and flows
past bedrooms in the boroughs—
and it's money, cement, or wind
in New York’s counterfeit dawn.
I know the mountains exist.
And wisdom’s eyeglasses,
too. But I didn’t come to see the sky.
I'm here to see the clouded blood,
the blood that sweeps machines over waterfalls
and the soul toward the cobra’s tongue.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
8
Every day in New York, they slaughter
four million ducks,
five million hogs
two thousand pigeons to accommodate the tastes of the dying,
one million cows,
one million lambs,
and two million roosters
that smash the skies to pieces.
It’s better to sob while honing the blade
or kill dogs on the delirious hunts
than to resist at dawn
the endless milk trains,
the endless blood trains
and the trains of roses, manacled
by the dealers in perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons,
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood
under the multiplications,
and the terrified bellowing of the cows wrung dry
fills the valley with sorrow
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.
I denounce everyone
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
9
who ignores the other half,
the half that can’t be redeemed,
who lift their mountains of cement
where the hearts beat
inside forgotten little animals
and where all of us will fall
in the last feast of pneumatic drills.
I spit in all your faces.
The other half hears me,
devouring, pissing, flying in their purity,
like the supers’ children in lobbies
who carry fragile twigs
to the emptied spaces where
the insect antennae are rusting.
This is not hell, but the street.
Not death, but the fruit stand.
There is a world of broken rivers and distances just beyond our grasp
in the cat’s paw smashed by a car,
and I hear the earthworm’s song
in the hearts of many girls.
Rust, fermentation, quaking earth.
You yourself are the earth as you drift in office numbers.
What shall I do now? Set the landscape in order?
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
10
Order the loves that soon become photographs,
that soon become pieces of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, no: I denounce it all.
I denounce the conspiracy
of these deserted offices
that radiate no agony,
that erase the forest’s plans,
and I offer myself as food for the cows wrung dry
when their bellowing fills the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.
(applause)
You know, it may be that I can’t find the third poem, which would be a blessing for you.
No, I seem to have lost it. Be patient with me. Once I held an audience up for almost
fifteen minutes searching for a poem only to remember that I’d never written it.
(laughter) Well, perhaps, ah, here! Here it is! A scrap of paper. (applause) Okay, I hope
it was worth it. At any rate, it was García Lorca who helped me along with a little-known,
perhaps not so little-known eighteenth-century poet, Christopher Smart, it helped me, it
gave me the kind of key, a key to writing the poems I needed to write about my own early
life as an industrial worker in Detroit.
They Feed They Lion
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
11
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
12
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Thank you.
(applause)
Please welcome Tracy K. Smith.
(applause)
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
13
TRACY K. SMITH: It’s such an honor to be here in celebration of a poet who’s meant
so many different things to so many of us. I always love hearing the way that a single
poet’s work fits into so many different voices, and I think that’s what we’ll be gifted with
tonight.
I thought I would start with a couple of poems of my own that I published in a book
called Duende about seven, six or seven years ago, and the concept of duende was
introduced to me when I was a student of creative writing, and it seemed like a really
powerful and helpful aesthetic concept, but it didn’t become visceral for me until I
traveled in Spain and heard the music that Lorca tries in such wonderful ways to describe
in the prose of the essay “Theory and Play of the Duende.” So I’ll start with a poem that
came out of that experience and it’s called “Duende.” There are a few moments where
you’ll hear my attempt to translate different like flamenco lyrics. Maybe they’ll stand out
to you or maybe they’ll just blend in.
Duende
1.
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
They drag it out and with nails in their feet
Coax the night into being. Brief believing.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
14
A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill—
I’m going to braid my hair
Braid many colors into my hair
I’ll put a long braid in my hair
And write your name there
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
The clatter, the mad slap of landing.
2.
And not just them. Not just
The ramshackle family, the tios,
Primitos, not just the bailaor
Whose heels have notched
And hammered time
So the hours flow in place
Like a tin river, marking
Only what once was.
Not just the voices scraping
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
15
Against the river, nor the hands
nudging them farther, fingers
like blind birds, palms empty,
echoing. Not just the women
with sober faces and flowers
in their hair, the ones who dance
as though they’re burying
memory—one last time—
beneath them.
And I hate to do it here.
To set myself heavily beside them.
Not now that they’ve proven
The body a myth, parable
For what not even language
Moves quickly enough to name.
If I call it pain, and try to touch it
With my hands, my own life,
It lies still and the music thins,
A pulse felt for through garments.
If I lean into the desire it starts from—
If I lean unbuttoned into the blow
Of loss after loss, love tossed
Into the ecstatic void—
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
16
It carries me with it farther,
To chords that stretch and bend
Like light through colored glass.
But it races on, toward shadows
Where the world I know
And the world I fear
Threaten to meet.
3.
There is always a road,
The sea, dark hair, dolor.
Always a question
Bigger than itself—
They say you’re leaving Monday
Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?
As an artist I really love this sense that when you’re really getting to the heart of the
matter it’s about surrendering to something internal that is disruptive and dangerous and
the more I started to think about that concept and to also locate it in art forms that aren’t
just indigenous to Andalucía, the more I started seeing it everywhere, in the social realm,
in the private sphere, in politics, in, you know, our small private lives and this is a poem
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
17
that is about my family that somehow felt like the duende was gesturing. It’s called
“Slow Burn.”
We tend toward the danger at the center.
Soft core teeming blue with fire. We tend
Toward what will singe and flare, but coil
Back when brought near. Sometimes we read
About people pushed there and left to recover.
They don’t. Come out mangled or not at all,
Minds flayed by visions no one can fathom.
I have a cousin who haunts the basement
In my aunt’s house, drinking her liquor.
The air around him is cold, and he swings at it,
Working himself into a sweat like a boxer
Or an addict. Sometimes he comes upstairs
To eat her food, feeding the thing inside him.
We laugh, thinking laughter will make us safe,
Then we go home and lie down in our lives.
Sometimes when my thoughts won’t sit still,
I imagine Marcus down there awake in the dark,
Hands fisted in his lap, or upturned, open
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
18
In what might be a kind of prayer. I’m certain
The same thing dragging his heart drags ours,
Only he’s not afraid to name it. Can call it up
Into the room and swear at it, or let it rest there
On the couch beside him till his head slumps
Onto his chest and the TV bruises the walls
With unearthly light.
And now I’m delighted to welcome my friend and colleague Paul Muldoon. He and I will
read a couple of Lorca poems together.
(applause)
PAUL MULDOON: So this is “Sleepwalking Ballad.”
Sleepwalking Ballad
Green I want you green.
Green wind. Green boughs.
Ship on the sea
And horse on the mountain
With shadow at her waist
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
19
she dreams at her railing,
green flesh, green hair,
and eyes of cold silver.
Green I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
things are looking at her,
and she cannot return their gaze.
TRACY K. SMITH:
Green I want you green.
Green stars of frost
Come with the shadow fish
that opens the road for dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
On the sandpaper of its boughs,
and the hill, a wild cat,
bristles with sour cactus.
But who will come? From where?
Still she stays at her railing,
green flesh, green hair,
dreaming of the bitter sea.
PAUL MULDOON:
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
20
—Compadre, I want to trade
my horse for your house,
my saddle for your mirror,
my knife for your blanket.
Compadre, I’ve come here bleeding
from the passes of Cabra.
—If I could, young man,
I would make that trade.
But I am no longer I,
And my house is no longer mine.
—Compadre, I want to die
decently in my own bed.
A steel one if possible,
With real linen sheets.
Don’t you see this wound
from my chest to my throat?
—Three-hundred brown roses
cover your white shirt.
Your blood oozes and smells
around your sash.
But I am no longer I,
And my house is no longer mine.
—Let me climb at least up
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
21
to the high railings.
Let me climb! Let me up
to the green rails.
Big railings of the moon,
where the water roars.
TRACY K. SMITH:
Up the two compadres climb
Up to the high rails
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of tears.
Little tin-leaf lanterns
Tremble on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
Were wounding the early hours.
PAUL MULDOON:
Green I want you green,
green wind, green boughs.
Up the two compadres climbed
The long wind was leaving
a strange taste in their mouths
of basil, gall, and mint.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
22
Compadre! Where is she?
Where is your bitter girl?
How often she awaited you!
How often did she wait,
fresh face, black hair,
on this rail of green!
TRACY K. SMITH:
The gypsy girl was rocking
On the rain well’s face
Green flesh, green hair,
And eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of the moon
Holds her over the water.
The night became as intimate
As a village square.
Drunken civil guards
were pounding at the door.
Green I want you green.
Green Wind. Green boughs.
Ship on the sea,
and horse on the mountain.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
23
I should have mentioned that that beautiful translation was by Christopher Maurer.
(applause) And this is “Sleepless City: Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne.”
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
Lunar creatures sniff and circle the dwellings.
Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don’t dream,
and the brokenhearted fugitive will meet on street corners
an incredible crocodile resting beneath the tender protest of the stars.
PAUL MULDOON:
Out in the world, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
There is a corpse in the farthest graveyard
complaining for three years
because of an arid landscape in his knee;
and a boy who was buried this morning cried so much
they had to call the dogs to quiet him.
TRACY K. SMITH:
Life is no dream. Watch out! Watch out! Watch out!
We fall down stairs and eat the humid earth,
or we climb to the snow’s edge with the choir of dead dahlias.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
24
But there is no oblivion, no dream:
raw flesh. Kisses tie mouths
in a tangle of new veins
and those in pain will bear it with no respite
and those who are frightened by death will carry it on their shoulders.
PAUL MULDOON:
One day
horses will live in the taverns
and furious ants
will attack the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cattle.
Another day
we’ll witness the resurrection of dried butterflies,
and still walking in a landscape of gray sponges and silent ships,
we’ll see our ring shine and roses spill from our tongues.
Watch out! Watch out! Watch out!
Those still marked by claws and cloudburst,
that boy who cries because he doesn’t know bridges exist,
or that corpse that is nothing more than its head and one shoe—
they all must be led to the wall where iguanas and serpents wait,
where the bear’s teeth wait,
where the mummified hand of a child waits
and the camel’s fur bristles with a violent blue shiver.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
25
TRACY K. SMITH:
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
But if someone closes his eyes,
whip him, my children, whip him!
Let there be a panorama of open eyes
and bitter inflamed wounds.
Out in the world, no one sleeps. No one. No one.
I’ve said it before.
No one sleeps.
But at night, if someone has too much moss on his temples,
open the trap doors so he can see in moonlight
the fake goblets, the venom, and the skull of the theaters.
(applause)
PAUL MULDOON: Tracy, Tracy K. Smith. So this is my own attempt to translate a
poem by Lorca. “Muerta,” Death.
What a tremendous effort they all put into it.
The horse does its damnedest
To become a dog.
The dog tries so hard to become a swallow.
The swallow busies itself with becoming a bee.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
26
The bee does its level best to become a horse.
As for the horse,
Just look at the barbed arrow it draws from the rose,
That faint rose lifting from its underlip!
The rose meanwhile,
What a slew of lights and calls
Are bound up in the living sugar of its stem.
The sugar in turn,
Those daggers it conjures while standing watch!
The little daggers themselves,
Such a moon mindless horse stalls, such nakedness,
Such robust and ruddy skin as they’re bent upon!
And I, perched on the gable end,
What a blazing angel I aim at being and am.
The arch made of plaster, however,
How huge, how invisible, then how small it is,
Without the least striving!
Just to round things off in this section. We began with Tracy K. Smith poems inspired by
the idea, the notion of duende, and I’ve been asked to read that little section from the
lecture on “Play and Theory of the Duende” where Lorca expounds on this notion. And
then I will hand over at that point to Will Keane, who’s going to perform some of the
lecture, or read some of the lecture.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
27
“The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must
know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house and rock those branches we all
wear, branches that do not have, will never have, consolation.
“With idea, sound, or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of
the well. Angel and muse escape with violin, meter, and compass; the duende wounds. In
the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the strange, invented qualities of a
man’s work.
“The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in
dark water all who look at it, for with duende it is easier to love and understand, and one
can be sure of being loved and understood. In poetry this struggle for expression and
communication is sometimes fatal.”
(applause)
WILL KEANE:
Ladies and gentlemen. Whenever I speak before a large group I always have the feeling
that I’ve just taken the wrong door. Some friendly hands have given me a shove and here
I am. Half of us wander around completely lost amid drop curtains, painted trees, tin
fountains, and just when we think we’ve found our room or our circle of lukewarm sun,
we meet an alligator who swallows us up, or an audience, as I have. Well, the only show
that I can offer you today is some bitter but living poetry. Maybe I can lash its eyes open
for you. I’ve said “A Poet in New York” and I should have said “New York in a Poet.”
The poet is me, purely and simply, a poet without genius or talent but who manages to
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
28
escape through the misty edge of the day’s mirror sometimes more quickly than many
children. A poet who comes to this auditorium wanting to imagine that he is in his room,
and that you, you’re my friends. Because written poetry can’t exist without eyes which
are enslaved to the obscure line without docility as friendly ears through which the liquid
word carries blood to the lips and sky to the brow of the man who hears them.
Well, then, in any event, I must speak clearly. I haven’t come here to entertain you. I
don’t want to, not bothered, couldn’t care less. I’ve come here to fight, to fight body to
body against a placid mass, given that I’m not going to give a lecture but a poetry
reading—my flesh, my joy, my feelings—and I have to defend myself against the huge
dragon which I have in front of me, which could swallow me up with his three hundred
yawns or his three hundred cheated heads, and that’s the fight because I vehemently want
to communicate with you, given that I’m here, given that I’ve come, given that I’ve
broken my law of poetic silence.
And I don’t want to give you honey. I have none. But sand or hemlock or salt water
fighting body to body and I don’t care if I lose. Let’s agree that one of man’s most
beautiful postures is the posture of Saint Sebastian. Well, then, the first thing that one
must do when reading poetry aloud in front of so many creatures is to ask for help from
the duende. That’s the only way that everyone’s going to get it, without the help of the
intellect, the critical apparatus recovering instantaneously the sense of the metaphor and
tracking at the speed of the voice the poem’s rhythmic design, because poetry can’t be
judged on one reading, specially not poems like these, packed as they are with poetic
events which respond only to the logic of lyric and thickly woven out of human feelings
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
29
and their own poetic architecture, that they’re not likely to be readily understood without
the cordial help of the duende.
In any event, I have a great rain cape, both as a man and as a poet, a cape which says,
“It’s your fault.” A cape which I hang on the shoulders of anyone who comes to me
asking for explanations. Me, I can’t explain anything, only mumble out the fire within
me. Well, I’m not going to tell you what New York is like from the outside. New York
and Moscow, those two antagonistic cities over which a whole flood of descriptive books
has been poured at the moment, nor will I narrate a voyage. What I’m going to give you
is my lyrical reaction in all simplicity and sincerity. Simplicity and sincerity, so difficult
for the intellectual, so easy for the poet. In order to come here today I’ve had to overcome
my poetic bashfulness.
The two elements which the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman
architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish—at first glance that rhythm may
be confused with gaiety but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life
and at the painful slavery of men and machines together you understand that it is that
typical empty anguish which renders forgivable as a means of escape even serious crime
and banditry. The buildings’ angles rise to the sky wanting neither clouds nor glory.
Gothic angles rise from the hearts of the long dead and buried. But these angles climb
coldly skyward with a beauty which has no roots nor final yearning. Officially certain
and unable to defeat or transcend the perpetually inferior designs of the architect. There’s
nothing so poetic and terrible as the skyscrapers’ battle with the skies that cover them—
snows, rains, mists frame, soak, and veil these vast towers and these towers blind to any
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
30
sort of play declare their cold intent, the enemy to mystery, cut the rain’s hair, shine their
three thousand swords through the soft swan of the mist. Then it takes a few days to
realize that this immense world has no roots and to understand why the seer Edgar Poe
had to hug mystery to him and the amiable frenzy of drunkenness.
Alone and wandering, I evoked my childhood like this: Intermezzo, 1910.
Those eyes of mine in nineteen-ten
saw not the burial of the dead,
the ash bizarre of the dawn weeper,
or the trembling heart trapped as a seahorse.
Those eyes of mine in nineteen-ten
saw the white wall where little girls peed,
the bull’s muzzle, the poisonous mushroom,
and a moon incomprehensible which shone through the corners
on bits of dry lemon, under the hard black bottles.
Those eyes of mine on the pony’s neck,
on the pierced breast of sleeping Santa Rose,
On love’s roofs, with sighing and cold hands,
in a garden where the cats eat the frogs.
Attic where the ancient dust assembles statues and mosses.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
31
Boxes guarding the silence of guzzled crabs.
Where the dream went stumbling into its reality.
There—my little eyes.
Ask me nothing. I have seen that things
When they seek their course find their emptiness.
There is a hollowing pain through the unpeopled air
and in my eyes, dressed creatures—not one nude!
What is astonishing for its coldness and its cruelty is Wall Street. The gold comes
pouring in from all over the earth and death comes with it. There as nowhere else on earth
you feel the absolute absence of spirit. Herds of men who can’t count past three, herds
more who can’t count past six, scorn for pure science, and a demoniacal respect for the
present, and the terrible thing is that the whole crowd that fills it believes the world will
always be like this and that it is their duty to keep the great machine running day and
night and forever with the perfect result of a Protestant mentality, which speaking as a
typical Spaniard, thank God, shattered my nerves.
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock market crash, where they
lost several billion dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea,
never amid assorted suicides, hysterics, and synchronized fainters have I ever felt the
sensation of real death, of death without hope, death which is putrefaction and nothing
else as in that moment. Because the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness, and
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
32
I who come from a country where as the great father Unamuno says, “at night the earth
climbs up to the sky,” I felt something like a divine urge to bombard the whole of that
shadowy gorge where the suicides were carried off by ambulances with their hands
packed with rings, and that’s why I set my “Dance of Death” there. The typical African
mask, death truly dead without angels or resurrected, death estranged from all spirit,
barbarous and primitive as the United States, a country which has never fought and never
will fight for heaven.
“Dance of Death”
The mask. Look at the mask
coming from Africa to New York.
The pepper trees are gone,
the tiny buds of phosphorus.
The flesh-torn camels are gone,
and the valleys of light the swan picked up in its beak.
It was the moment of dry things,
of the wheat straw in the eye, and the laminated cat,
of the rusted iron of the great bridges
and of cork’s definitive silence.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
33
It was the great gathering of dead animals
transfixed with blades of light.
The ageless joy of the hippopotamus with its ashen hooves
and of the gazelle with the house leek in its throat.
In the wilting, waveless solitude,
danced the crumpled mask.
Half of the world was out of sand,
of mercury and sleeping sun the other.
The mask. Look at the mask!
Sand, crocodile, and fear over New York.
Lime canyons imprisoned in an empty sky,
where the shouts rang out of those of who die under guano.
A sky peeled and pure, the spit of itself
with the down and sharpened lily of its invisible mountains.
Put an end to the slenderest song-shoots
and turned to a downpour of sap,
in a box at the resting of the last parades,
lifting mirror shards with its tail.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
34
While the Chinaman wept on the roof,
not finding the nude of his wife,
and the bank manager examined the monometer
which measures the merciless hush of coins,
the mask arrived on Wall Street.
It isn’t strange for the dance,
this columbarium which yellows the eyes.
From the Sphinx to the bank vault runs a tensed thread
which pierces the heart of all poor children.
The primitive impulse dances with the mechanical impulse,
ignorant, in their frenzy, of original light.
For if the wheel forgets its formula,
it can sing naked amid the horses’ herds;
and if a flame burns up the frozen plans,
the sky must flee before the windows’ tumult.
It isn’t strange for the dance this place, I’m telling you.
The mask will dance amid columns of blood and numbers,
amid hurricanes of gold and the groaning of the unemployed,
who will howl, dark night, for your lightless time.
Oh savage North America, oh shameless, oh savage!
Stretched out across the snow’s frontier.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
35
The mask. Look at the mask!
What a wave of mud and fireflies over New York.
***
I was on the terrace, wrestling with the moon.
A flock of windows bombarding night’s thigh.
In my eyes the sweet cattle of heaven drank
and the breezes from long oars
buffeted the cindered panes of Broadway.
The drop of blood sought light from the yolk of a star
to play dead appleseed.
And the prairie air, driven by shepherds,
quivered with the fear of a mollusk unshelled.
But it isn’t the dead who dance,
I’m certain.
The dead are engrossed gobbling their own hands.
It’s the rest who dance with the mask and its vihuela.
It’s the rest, the silver drunk, the cold men
who were raised at the intersection of thighs and hard flames,
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
36
who seek the worm in the landscape of ladders,
and who drink in the bank dead girls’ tears
and who eat in corners tiny pyramids of the dawn.
Don’t let the pope dance.
No!
Don’t let the pope dance!
Or the king,
or the millionaire with his blue teeth,
or the dry cathedral dancers,
or builders, or emeralds, or madmen, or sodomites.
Only this mask.
This mask of aged scarlet fever.
Only this mask!
By and by cobras will hiss around the top floors.
By and by nettles shake courtyards and terraces.
By and by the stock exchange will be a mossy pyramid.
By and by the creepers will follow in the rifles
and so soon so soon so soon
Oh Wall Street!
The mask. Look at the mask!
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
37
How it splutters its jungle venom
Through the imperfect anguish of New York!
(applause)
JOHN GIORNO: Hi. I was planning to read a new piece that was a memoir piece that
takes place in 1954 about García Lorca and it’s called “Lorca Please Help Me.” But
something terrible happened. I forgot the pieces of paper home, so I can’t do it, and it’s a
new piece, so I’m going to do something second best, which is read a poem of mine
which my life has been deeply influenced by Lorca and this poem I’m going to read is
called “Thanx for Nothing,” and I wrote it on my seventieth birthday.
Thanx 4 Nothing
On My 70th Birthday
I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything,
and as a token of my appreciation,
I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits
as magnificent priceless jewels,
wish-fulfilling gems satisfying your every need and want,
thank you, thank you, thank you,
thanks.
May every drug I ever took
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
38
come back and get you high,
may every glass of wine and vodka I ever drank
come back and make you feel really good,
numbing your nerve ends
allowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free,
may all the suicides be songs of aspiration,
thanks that bad news is always true,
may all the chocolate I’ve ever eaten
come back rushing through your bloodstream
and make you feel happy,
thanks for allowing me to be a poet
a noble effort, doomed, but the only choice.
I want to thank you for your kindness and praise,
thanks for celebrating me,
thanks for the resounding applause,
Thanks for taking everything for yourself
and giving nothing back, (laughter)
you were always only self-serving,
thanks for exploiting my big ego
and making me a star for your own benefit,
thanks that you never paid me,
thanks for all the sleaze,
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
39
thanks for being mean and rude
and smiling at my face,
I am happy that you robbed me,
I am happy that you lied
I am happy that you helped me,
thanks, grazie, merci beaucoup.
May you smoke a joint with William,
and spend some intimate time with his mind,
more profound than any book he wrote,
I give enormous thanks to all my lovers,
beautiful men with brilliant minds,
Bob, Jasper, Ugo,
may they come here
and make love to you, (laughter)
and may my many other lovers
of totally great sex,
countless lovers
of boundless fabulous sex
countless lovers of boundless fabulous sex
countless lovers of boundless
fabulous sex
in the golden age
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
40
of promiscuity,
may they all come here,
and make love to you,
if you want, (laughter)
may they hold you in their arms
balling
to your hearts
delight.
balling to your hearts
delight
balling to your hearts delight
May all the people who are dead
Allen, Brion, Cookie, Jack,
and I do not miss any of you
I don’t miss any of them,
no nostalgia,
it was wonderful that we loved each other
but I do not want any of them back; (laughter)
now, if any of you
are attracted to any of them,
may they come back from the dead,
and do whatever is your pleasure,
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
41
may they multiply,
and be the slaves
of whomever wants them,
satisfying your every wish and desire,
(but you won’t want them as masters,
as they’re demons),
may Andy come here
fall in love with you
and make each of you a superstar,
everyone can have
Andy.
everyone can
have Andy.
everyone can have Andy.
everyone can have an Andy.
Huge hugs to my friends who betrayed me,
every friend became an enemy,
sooner or later,
deep kisses to my loves that failed,
I am delighted you are vacuum cleaners
sucking everything into your dirt bag, (laughter)
you are none other than a reflection of my mind.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
42
Thanks for the depression problem
and feeling like suicide
every day of my life,
and now that I’m seventy-six,
I am happily almost there.
Twenty billion years ago,
in the primordial wisdom soup
beyond comprehension and indescribable,
something without substance moved slightly,
and became something imperceptible,
moved again and became something invisible,
moved again and became a particle and particles,
moved again and became a quark, and
again and became quarks,
moved again and again and became protons and neutrons,
and the twelve dimensions of space,
tiny fire balls of primordial energy,
bits tossed back and forth
in a game of catch between particles,
transmitting electromagnetic light
and going really fast, 40 million times a second,
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
43
where the pebble hits the water,
this is where the trouble began,
something without substance became something with substance,
why did this happen?
because something substanceless
had a feeling of missing out on something,
not
getting it
not getting it,
not getting it,
not getting something
when there was nothing to have,
from that primordially endless potential,
to modern-day reality,
twenty billion years later,
has produced me,
and my stupid grasping mind,
has made me and you and my grasping mind.
May Rinpoche and all the great Tibetan teachers who loved me,
come back and love you more,
may they hold you in their wisdom hearts,
bathe you in all-pervasive compassion,
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
44
give you pith instructions,
and may you with the diligence of Olympic athletes
do meditation practice,
and may you with great confidence
realize the true nature of mind.
America, thanks for the neglect,
I did it without you, (laughter)
let us celebrate poetic justice,
you and I never were,
never tried to do anything,
and never succeeded,
thanks for introducing me to
the face of the naked mind,
thanx 4 nothing.
(applause)
WILL KEANE: The month of August is here. New York is flattened by heat, [Query:
Insert 1:14:47] Ecija (MY BEST GUESS) style, and I must leave for the countryside.
Green Lake, a landscape of fir trees, suddenly in the forest, an abandoned spinning wheel,
a little girl, Mary, who eats maple syrup, and a little boy, Stanton, who plays the Jew’s
harp keep me company, patiently teach me the list of the American presidents and when
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
45
they get to the great Lincoln, they give him a military salute. Stanton’s father owns four
blind horses which he bought in the village of Eden Mills, their mother almost always has
a fever and I run, I drink good water, and my mood sweetens amid the fir trees and my
little friends.
They introduce me to the Miss Tylers, two penniless descendents of an American
president, who live in a cabin, take photographs, which they entitle “Exquisite Silence”
and they play on an incredible spinet songs from the heroic age of Washington. They’re
very old, they wear trousers so the brambles don’t scratch them, they’re very tiny, but
they have beautiful white hair, and they hold hands, and they listen to me improvise some
songs just for them at the spinet, and sometimes they invite me for lunch, at which they
give me nothing but tea (laughter) and a few pieces of cheese, but they assure me the
teapot is genuine china and that there is jasmine in the tea.
At the end of August they take me to their cabin and they say, “Don’t you know? Autumn
is almost here, and sure enough on the tables, on the spinet, around the portrait of Tyler,
the leaves and tendrils, yellow, reddish, orange, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and in
these surroundings, of course, my poetry took on the tone of the forest. Tired of New
York and yearning for the poorest, least significant living things, I wrote an insectary
which I can’t read to you now but in which I begin in asking the Virgin for help, the Ave
Maria Stella, that delightful Catholic folk, in singing to the insects, who spend their lives
flying and praising our lord with their diminutive instruments. Moon and panorama of the
insects, “The Poet Prays to the Virgin for Help.”
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
46
I pray to the Divine Mother of God,
Heavenly Queen of all living things,
grant me the pure light of the little animals
who have a single letter in their vocabulary.
Animals without souls. Simple shapes.
Far from the despicable knowledge of the cat.
Far from the fictitious profundity of the owl.
Far from the sculptural wisdom of the horse.
Creatures love without eyes,
with a single sense of rippling infinity,
and who gather themselves together into great heaps
to be eaten up by the birds.
Grant me the single dimension
that little flat animals have
to tell of things covered with earth
beneath the shoe’s hard innocence.
Nobody weeps comprehending
the millions of tiny deaths at the market,
that Chinese multitude of beheaded onions,
that great yellow sun of old flattened fish.
You, Mother, ever terrible, whale of all the skies;
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
47
you, Mother, ever the joker, neighbor of the borrowed parsley:
you know I comprehend the world’s tiniest flesh
that I may give it voice.
But one day Little Mary fell into the well and they pulled her out drowned. It wouldn’t be
right to tell of the deep sorrow and the true despair which I felt that day, that belongs to
the walls and the trees that saw me, but at once I thought of that other little girl in
Granada whom I saw taken out of the cistern, her little hands tangled in the gaffs and her
head knocking against the brick, and the two girls, Mary and the other one, became the
same child who cried and cried, unable to leave the circle of the well in the stopped water
that never flows out to the sea.
Little Girl Drowned in a Well (Granada and Newburgh)
Statues suffer with their eyes for the darkness of coffins,
but far more they suffer for water that can’t flow out . . .
that can’t flow out.
A timeless folk rattled on the battlements, breaking the fisherman’s poles.
Quick! The sides! Hurry! And the tender stars croaked.
. . . but can’t flow out.
Tranquil in my memory, planic, circle, target,
you cry on the shores of a horse’s eye.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
48
. . . that can’t flow out.
But no one in that dark can offer you distance,
only sharpened limit: diamond to come.
. . . that can’t flow out.
People seek the pillow’s silence
you pulse forever, trapped in your ring.
. . . that can’t flow out.
Eternal in the endings of ripples which accept
roots’ battle and solitude foreseen.
. . . that can’t flow out.
They’re coming down the ramps! Rise out of the water!
Every point of light will make you a chain!
. . . that can’t flow out.
But the well stretches out to you, little moss hands,
unimagined nymph in its chaste ignorance.
. . . that can’t flow out.
No, that can’t flow out. Water trapped in a place,
breathing with all its violins unstringed
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
49
in the key of wounds and deserted buildings.
Water that can’t flow out!
With the little girl dead I couldn’t stay in the house any longer. Stanton, with a sad face,
ate the maple syrup which his sister had left him, and the divine Miss Tylers were madly
taking photographs of the autumn woods to give to me as presents. I went down to the
lake for a silence of the waters, cuckoo, et cetera et cetera made it impossible for me to sit
in any position. Every posture I felt like a romantic lithograph under which was written
“Federico allowed his thoughts to wander,” until at last a splendid line from Garcilaso put
to an end to that statuesque obsession. “Our cattle graze. The wind sends forth its breath,”
and the Double Poem of Lake Eden Mills was born.
It was my old voice,
ignorant of damp, bitter juices
which came licking at my feet
beneath the fragile ferns.
Oh, voice of my love
oh, voice of my truth,
voice of my open side,
when all the roses burst from my tongue
and the grass knew not the horse’s immovable bite!
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
50
Here you are drinking my blood,
drinking the humor of the child I was,
while my eyes shatter in the wind with aluminum
and the shouting of drunks.
Let me through the gate
where Eve eats ants
and Adam impregnates dazzling fish.
Let me through, you horned homunculi
to the forest of outstretchings
and leapings for pure joy.
I know the secretest function
of an old rusty pin
and I know the horror of wide-awake eyes
on the concrete surface of a plate.
But I want neither world nor dream, divine voice,
I want my freedom, my human love
in the darkest corner of the unwanted breeze.
My human love!
Those sea-dogs chase each other
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
51
and the wind stalks the careless trunks.
Oh, old voice, burn out with your tongue
this voice of tin and talcum!
I want to cry because I feel like it –
as the backroad children cry –
because I am not a man, or a poet, or a leaf,
but a wounded pulse sounding the things beyond.
I want to cry speaking my name,
rose, child, fir on the shore of this lake,
to speak my man of blood’s truth
killing within me the mockery and the suggestings around the word.
No, no, I’m not asking, I’m wishing,
oh, my voice at liberty licking my hands.
In the maze of screens my nakedness receives
the punishing moon and the ash-covered clock.
That’s how I spoke.
That’s how I spoke when Saturn stopped the trains
and fog and Dream and Death came to find me.
They came to find me in the place
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
52
where the cattle low with their bellhop feet
and my body floats between contrary equilibriums.
The summer vacation is over because Saturn stopped the trains and I must return to New
York and the drowned girl, little Stanton sugar-eater, and the trouserly sisters stay with
me for a long time. The train races along the Canadian frontier, and I feel unhappy and I
miss my little friends, but the girl withdraws into the well amid a host of green angels,
and on the boy’s chest begins to sprout, as saltpeter on a damp wall, the cruel star of the
North American police.
And then once again the frenzied rhythm of New York, but it no longer surprises me. I
know the mechanism of the streets, and I talk to people and I penetrate more deeply into
the social life and I denounce it, and I denounce it because I come from the countryside,
and I believe that man is not the most important thing. New York (Office and
Denunciation):
Beneath the multiplications,
is a drop of duck's blood;
Beneath the divisions,
is a drop of sailor’s blood;
Beneath the addings up, a river of tender blood.
A river which comes singing through the
outlying bedrooms –
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
53
and it’s silver, cement, or breeze
in the lying dawn of New York.
Mountains exist, I know.
And spectacles for wisdom,
I know. But I didn’t come to see the sky.
I came to see the muddled blood,
the blood which carries machines towards the cataracts
and the spirit towards the cobra’s tongue.
Every day, they kill in New York
four million ducks,
five million pigs,
two thousand pigeons for the delectation of the dying,
one million cows.
one million lambs,
and two million cockerels
who leave the sky in splinters.
Better to sob while you sharpen the knife
or to murder the dogs on headspinning hunts
than resist at dawn
the interminable milk trains,
the interminable blood trains
and the trains of roses, manacled
by the perfume dealers.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
54
The ducks and the pigeons,
the pigs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood
beneath the multiplications,
and the terrible screams of mashed cattle
fill with sorrow the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.
I denounce all those people
who ignore the other half,
the irredeemable half,
who raise their mountains of cement
where the hearts beat
of the little forgettable animals
and where we’ll all of us fall
in the final feast of the jackhammers.
I spit in your faces.
The other half hears me,
gobbling, pissing, flying in their purity,
like hall porter children
who take fragile sticks
to the holes where
rust the insects antennae.
It’s not hell, it’s the street.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
55
It’s not death, it’s the fruit stall.
There is a world of smashed rivers and ungraspable distances
in that cat’s little paw smashed by a car,
and I hear the worm’s song
in the hearts of many little girls.
Rust, ferment, shaken earth.
The earth itself as you go swimming through the office numbers.
What am I going to do? Tidy the landscapes?
Tidy the loves which turn to photographs,
which turn to wood chunks and mouthfuls of blood?
No, no: I denounce.
I denounce the conspiracy
of these deserted offices
which don’t transmit the agonies,
which erase the forests’ programs,
and I offer to be eaten by the mashed cattle
when their screams fill the valley
and the Hudson gets drunk on oil.
The time is passing. And I must leave New York. I’m already on the ship which is taking
me away from the howling city and towards the beautiful Antilles, angles and rhythm,
form and anguish. The sky is swallowing them up. No longer does tower battle with
cloud nor swarms of windows eat up the greater part of the night. Flying fish weave
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
56
sopping garlands in the sky like that incredible big blue woman of Picasso runs all across
the sea, her arms open. The sky has conquered the skyscrapers, the Chrysler building
defends itself against the sun with its huge silver beak and bridges, ships, railways, and
men appear to me now enchained and deaf, enchained by a cruel economic system whose
throat must soon be cut.
In any event, I’m leaving New York with a certain sadness. I’m leaving many friends
here and it’s given me one of the most useful experiences of my life. I must thank it for
many things.
(applause)
CHRISTOPHER MAURER: Hello. As García Lorca read that lecture during the last
five years of his life in different cities of Spain, Argentina, and Uruguay, as he gave his
book that political reading and raised during the Great Depression his protest against a
cruel economic system whose throat must soon be cut, he thought of returning here. I
would like to talk just for a few minutes before Patti Smith plays about the theme of
return in his works and at the reception before we came in I think I persuaded Laura
García Lorca, the poet’s niece, to read some of his poems for us. I’ll be reading them in
English and I’m going to ask her, I think it’s important that we hear Lorca’s voice in
Spanish. (applause)
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
57
Thank you. So just a few, I’m going to read a little bit from the letters. He had long been
wanting to come back here. In 1930, fresh from his trip to New York and Cuba, he had
written to his beloved Dalí, the two were somewhat estranged by then, about the
stupendous year he had spent here.
“Though I find I hardly know you anymore and I don’t know what to say, what I do want
to tell you is that in January I’m going to have a lot of money.” I don’t know what that
money was from, perhaps performance of his plays. “And I’d like for you to come back
with me to New York. You can be there for six months and then go back to Paris or come
with me to Moscow. I want you to know the new things I’ve done, a little film I’ve made
with a black poet from New York that will have its premiere at a wonderful movie house
on Eighth Street where they show all the Russian and German films.” He’s thinking of
the Eighth Street Playhouse.
He says that he’s going to give an exhibition of his drawings, that he’s found a gallery,
that he has a huge number of friends, idiot friends he says, gay millionaires, ladies who
buy new paintings, señoras que compran cuadros neuvos, who will buy Dalí’s work.
“You will see things,” he tells Dalí, “you will see things you’ve never seen in that totally
new city, so contrary in its shape and forms and in its dreams to the rotten renovated
romanticism of Paris.”
But that trip, that return, was not to be. Dalí had his own designs on New York and there
was no going back to the love and the adventure that the two men had once shared. And
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
58
now for years before he had ever met Dalí, before he had met Dalí he had written,
“Things that go away never come back, never, as anyone knows, and in the bright
multitude of the winds there’s no use complaining. Am I right, poplar tree, teacher of the
breeze, no use complaining.”
LAURA GARCÍA LORCA:
Las cosas que se van no vuelven nunca,
todo el mundo lo sabe,
y entre el claro gentío de los vientos
es inútil quejarse.
¿Verdad, chopo, maestro de la brisa?
¡Es inútil quejarse!
CHRISTOPHER MAURER: But the idea of returning had persisted, it stayed with him.
In April 1936 García Lorca told a journalist that he wanted to stop in New York on his
way to Mexico where he would join his friend the great actress Margarita Xirgu, who was
putting on his plays there. “I’m just waiting,” he said, “for a cable from her which will
come this month. I’m thinking of going directly to New York, where I lived for a year
and then to Mexico by train. New York,” he says, “it’s terrible, it’s something monstrous
but I want to say hello to some old friends, Yankee friends of Spain,” Quiero saludar
antiguos amigos que son yanquis, amigos de España.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
59
That trip, too, was put off. Summer came, he was still in Madrid, where he wrote in a few
days The House of Bernarda Alba. He worked on a play which he never finished about
the world of the flamenco café and he pieced together what would become the final
manuscript of Poet in New York, exhibited here at the New York Public Library for the
first time. As he worked on Bernarda Alba he felt and heard the city becoming more
violent, sliding irrevocably into civil war and after he had decided to leave Madrid for
Granada, he took the manuscript of Poet in New York to the office of his publisher and
not finding him there grabbed a piece of stationery and wrote the note which was read
earlier: “Dear Pepe, I was here to see you and I think I’ll be back tomorrow. A hug from
Federico.” And weeks later he met his death in Granada. No return to Madrid, no return
to New York.
Tonight, honored to be here among such company, grateful to be with you, I’m thinking,
not sure why, about, as I said, the theme of return, the return, vuelta, retorno, regreso is
in the very essence of his poetry, it’s in its DNA, its musical refrains. I will read you—we
will read you—these three little examples. “Despedida”
LAURA GARCÍA LORCA:
Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto.
El niño come naranjas.
(Desde mi balcón lo veo).
El segador siega el trigo.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
60
(Desde mi balcón lo siento).
¡Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto!
CHRISTOPHER MAURER:
“Farewell”
If I die,
leave the window open.
The boy is eating oranges
(I see him from my window.)
The reaper is reaping the wheat.
(I feel him from my window.)
If I die,
leave the window open.
Or this one, “An Evening Moon,” from Songs, 1927:
The moon is dead, is dead,
Which will come back to life in spring
When the south wind ruffles the brow of the poplar
When our hearts have yielded their harvest of sighs
When the tile roofs are wearing their little green caps
The moon is dead, is dead, but she’ll come back to life in spring
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
61
LAURA GARCÍA LORCA:
La luna está muerta, muerta;
pero resucita en la primavera.
Cuando en la frente de los chopos
se rice el viento del Sur.
Cuando den nuestros corazones
su cosecha de suspiros.
Cuando se pongan los tejados
sus sombreritos de yerba.
La luna está muerta, muerta;
pero resucita en la primavera.
CHRISTOPHER MAURER: It’s the moon in that song of return. In another, the
evening star, from a suite entitled “Evening Hours.”
7:00
the first star
everything looking toward Venus,
and Venus like a girl who has fallen down a well
shivering, trembling,
as if to say
“will I be back tomorrow?”
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
62
LAURA GARCÍA LORCA:
La primera estrella.
Todo mira hacia Venus
y ella como una niña
que se cae en el aljibe
tiembla y tiembla
como diciendo
“¿volveré mañana?”
CHRISTOPHER MAURER:
His feeling for the return, he felt the return in the cycle of the seasons. Who but him
could offer sitting at the piano a lecture on the folk songs of Granada called “How a City
Sings from November to November.” He celebrated return in song, in time in what he
called the carousel of the calendar and in the vast panoply of the light reeling and
unreeling.
Song would like to be light.
In the dark,
It beams with phosphorus and moon.
Light doesn’t know what it wants
At its opaline edge,
it finds itself
And returns
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
63
The idea of return must have made him think of the straight line and the curve, must
have made him think how easy it is to get lost in a straight line. His friend Pedro Salinas
had that reaction when he came to New York for the first time and looked at its avenues.
Miles and miles of rectitude. que facil es perderse en una recta As for the poet in New
York, he wavers in the poem back from a walk between forms moving toward the serpent
,forms searching for crystal, and at times the author of Poet in New York seems to have
thought of his own road as a spiral ever advancing and returning. Once in a letter when
describing Dalí he compared Dalí’s straight line, the firm direction of his arrows, with his
own path, his camino salomonico as unstraight as that of a Baroque column. He writes,
thinking of Dali,
¡Oh línea recta! Pura
lanza sin caballero,
¡como suena tu luz
mi senda salomónica!
“A straight line, oh pure lance without a night, how your straight path dreams of my
spiral one.”
That spiral path bores down into the past, the subject of Poet in New York speaks of still
another sort of return, he longs to recover his childhood and a poetic voice that we just
heard that he feels has turned to tin and talc. “Oh voice I had before, may your tongue
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
64
burn this voice of tin and talc.” I’ve said it before, I return to this thought that Lorca is a
poet of absence and elegy, a poet of desire, a desire for what cannot be had, what cannot
be named if we could name it, there would be no poetry, if we could have it, we wouldn’t
want it, we would always want something else.
How wonderful when he trains his desire on the past, hunting there for that something
else, something not original but originary. Not for him the lukewarm desire of nostalgia,
that ultraviolet light. Nostalgia—for nostalgia he always has an ironic smile. The past
comes to life in his verse in the conditional, seldom in the present. I mean that often like
some of the women in his theater, his poetry wants not what was but what might have
been, what could have been, never what should have been. Lorca is no moralist.
When he returns to the past he imagines the seed that never flowered, children who might
have been born, the theories that went invisibly by undiscovered in a limbo of unrealized
futures, of unrealized possibilities, of as Unamuno put it, ex-futuros. As a poet he circles
back to tomorrow, back to the realm of immanence, back to the source. And we will
leave you with this poem written much earlier but remembered I think in New York, in
this city, where with us and like so many of us, he found a new beginning.
“The Return”
I’m coming back for my wings
Let me come back
I want to die being dawn
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
65
I want to die being yesterday
I’m coming back for my wings
Let me return
I want to die being source
Die running back from the scene
LAURA GARCÍA LORCA:
Yo vuelvo por mis alas,
dejadme volver.
Quiero morirme,
siendo amanecer.
Quiero morirme,
siendo ayer.
Yo vuelvo por mis alas,
dejadme tornar.
Quiero morirme,
siendo manantial.
Quiero morirme
fuera de la mar.
CHRISTOPHER MAURER:
Gracias, y Patti Smith.
(applause)
PATTI SMITH: Hello everybody. (applause) Earlier Paul mentioned a grand finale but
I thought in the world of Lorca, there are no grand finales but a series of finales, the
curtains open and close the curtains are closed and they open, they close and they are
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
66
opened, they close and they are opened, so I can only offer you another in a series of
finales of which hopefully in your sleep you will return.
Back from a walk
Murdered by the sky.
Among the forms that move toward the snake
and the form searching for crystal
I will let my hair grow.
With the limbless tree that cannot sing
And the boy with the white egg face.
With the broken-headed animals
And the ragged water of dry feet.
With all that is tired, deaf-mute,
and a butterfly drowned in an inkwell.
Stumbling onto my face, different every day.
Murdered by the sky!
(Patti Smith sings “Wing”)
I was a wing in heaven blue
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
67
on the ocean
soared over Spain
and I was free
I needed nobody
it was beautiful
it was beautiful
I was a pawn
Couldn’t make a move
Couldn’t go nowhere
No future at all
yet I was free
I needed nobody
it was beautiful
it was beautiful
and if there’s one thing
could do for you
you’d be a wing
in heaven blue
I was a vision
in another eye
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
68
and I saw nothing
no future at all
yet I was free
I needed nobody
it was beautiful
it was beautiful
and if there’s one thing
could do for you
you’d be a wing
in heaven blue
and if there’s one thing
could do for you
you’d be a wing
in heaven blue
and if there’s one thing
could do for you
you’d be a wing
in heaven blue
(applause)
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
69
Thank you. I’d like to introduce the poet Oliver Ray. He’s playing with me today,
tonight. Just coincidentally I noted tonight that the next poem I’m going to read was
written on December 27th, which is Oliver’s birthday, so I thought that was a nice thing.
Christmas on the Hudson
That gray sponge!
That sailor with his throat just slashed.
That great river.
That breeze of dark limits.
That edge, love. that edge!
Four sailors were struggling with the world.
With the world of chafe with all eyes to see.
the world you can’t cross without horses.
One, a hundred, a thousand sailors
they were struggling with the world of high velocities,
without realizing the world
was alone in the sky.
The world alone in the lonely sky.
These are the hills of hammers in the triumph of thick grass.
These are the swarming anthills in coins in mud.
The world alone in the lonely sky,
And the air in the outskirts of all the towns.
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
70
The worms sang the terror of the wheel,
and the slashed sailor
sang to the bear of water that would embrace his body;
and they all sang Halleluiah deserted sky.
It’s the same, it’s the same Halleluiah.
I’ve spent the whole night on the scaffolding of the city’s outskirts,
leaving my blood on the plaster of the projects,
helping the sailors rein in the torn sails,
and I am empty-handed in the murmur of the river's mouth.
It doesn’t matter,
it doesn’t matter that each minute
a new child shakes his small bunches of veins,
or that newborn viper let loose under the branches,
calms the blood thirst of those who look at the nude.
What matters is this: void. The world alone. The river’s mouth.
Not dawn. Inert fable.
Only this: the river’s mouth.
Oh, my gray sponge!
Oh, my throat slashed!
Oh, my great river!
Oh, my breeze of limits that aren’t mine!
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
71
Oh, edge of my love, oh wounding edge.
(applause)
Some years ago Oliver and I were privileged to go to Granada and sing and read for the
Lorca family, and we were brought to Granada by Laura, and in Granada we saw the
guitar of Lorca, and we also saw the field, another finale, just one in a string of finales,
where one of our greatest poets was led, with a bullfighter, I believe, and teacher, and
then shot dead and thrown in a common grave. That is not the end of our poet, for our
poet has no grand finales, he just keeps rolling along.
(Patti Smith sings “Beneath the Southern Cross”)
Oh
to be
not anyone
gone
this maze of being
skin
oh
to cry
not any cry
so mournful that
the dove just laughs
the steadfast gasps
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
72
oh
to owe
not anyone
nothing
to be
not here
but here
forsaking
equatorial bliss
who walked through
the callow mist
dressed in scraps
who walked
the curve of the world
whose bone scraped
whose flesh unfurled
who grieves not
anyone gone
to greet lame
the inspired stars
amazed to stumble
where gods get lost
beneath
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
73
the southern cross
amazed to stumble
where gods get lost
beneath the southern cross
Cross over, poet, cross over
Lorca!
(applause)
LIVELorca_6.4Transcript
74